Memories and Hearts Broken

Boom, the ball hit the wall. Boom, the bricks broke like a prizefighter’s ribs. Boom, the walls came crumbling down. And oh, how it hurt. How it hurt to see Comiskey Park sway and sag and vanish like a wicked witch being melted by a bucket of water.

I watched. I winced. With each swing of the wrecker’s ball, the condemned lady gave way. Boom, there goes her top, her torso, her foundation. Boom, there goes her structure, her makeup, her soul. Wow, was that baby ever built. Only now, nobody needed her anymore.

On an otherwise upbeat Wednesday in Chicago, with a beautiful new baseball stadium across 35th Street and a beautiful new Bo Jackson to exhibit in it, they dismantled the old museum/mausoleum where the 1919 Black Sox took a dive, where the 1959 White Sox won the pennant, where the 1977 White Sox inspired the home-run curtain call, where the 1983 White Sox invented Winning Ugly.

They dismembered the Palladium of my boyhood, the house the Old Roman built, my personal field of dreams. They took the oldest park of the major leagues apart stone by stone, from the exploding scoreboard to the picnic grounds, from the termite-infested dugouts to the walnut-paneled Bard’s Room Bill Veeck turned into an Algonquin Round Table for sociable characters who would never prefer a brandy to a beer.

Yellow school buses used to park in front of the Chicago Heights Star newspaper offices once a year so the circulation department could treat the paperboys and papergirls to their yearly free White Sox game. That was my introduction to Comiskey Park, the day I got to see Ted Williams wallop a home run and get hooted by those of us who knew nothing about the gentleman except that he played for the wrong-colored Sox.

Then there were those Dodgers, those miserable Los Angeles Dodgers, blowing into town from California, wherever the hell that was, actually believing they were going to beat our White Sox in the ’59 World Series. When the Sox won the opener, 11-0, an early win behind Early Wynn, we wondered why the Dodgers just didn’t go on home and be thankful for being successful enough to place second.

The air-raid sirens went off in Chicago on the day the White Sox clinched the 1959 pennant. People hid in their storm cellars, thinking Nikita Khrushchev must have finally flipped his red lid and launched a couple of atomic warheads at our poor heads. Mayor Daley reassured us that the news of the hour concerned something far more important than the American flag; for the first time in 40 years, the White Sox had won the American League flag.

I don’t know how many of us went to Comiskey Park expecting to see the home team win. When you come from Chicago and have two chances to win the World Series every season and don’t win one since 1917, you don’t go to the park overconfident. We knew in our hearts that the Dodgers probably would bounce back to win that World Series, damn that Larry Sherry anyway.

But we sure did have fun. We saw Chico Carrasquel and Little Looie Aparicio and Ozzie Guillen go deep in the hole to stab one-hop hoppers. We saw Nellie Fox choking up on his bottle-handled bat and Richie-Dick Allen swinging a slab of ash the size of a tree limb.

We had players such as Turk Lown and Joel Horlen and Jim Landis who meant more to us than they did to baseball. We had Sherm Lollar and Big Klu with his sleeves rolled up and Dave Nicholson, who had a pattern: Whiff, whiff, whiff, hit one to the moon, whiff, whiff, whiff, hit one to the moon. We had Ralph (Roadrunner) Garr and Oscar Gamble and a sizzler of a summer with the South Side Hit men, decorated with banners draped across the outfield fence that read, quite lyrically: Pitch at Risk to Richie Zisk.

Comiskey Park was the place where Eddie Cicotte served up fat ones deliberately to the Cincinnati Reds, while Ring Lardner sat up in the pressbox crooning: “I’m Forever Blowing Ballgames.” (Or maybe it was John Sayles.) Comiskey Park was the place where the All-Star game was born, where Disco Demolition Night led to a forfeit (for a good cause), where Veeck installed a center-field shower under which fans could cool off, where Jimmy Piersall reacted to third baseman Eric Soderholm’s commitment to good nutrition by screaming over the radio: “Nutrition makes me puke!”

Comiskey Park was the place that served spicy Mexican specialties and crispy fried chicken and baked dough rolled in sugar, back when other ballparks offered a choice of hot dogs with mustard and hot dogs without. Comiskey Park was the place where goldie-locked Nancy Faust on the organ played “Fool on the Hill” whenever the visiting manager trudged to the mound, and the naughty “na, na, na, na, hey hey” whenever the White Sox had the game in the bag.

Comiskey Park was the place where the parking lot was slightly less dangerous than North Vietnam, the place where Mary Frances Veeck dressed her husband’s employees in costumes more befitting Barnum and Bailey, the place where Eddie Stanky kept his punchless team in contention by storing boxes of baseballs inside a freezer, deadening them into rocks with seams.

She wasn’t pretty, Comiskey Park. She had more nicks and dents than a heap from a demolition derby, more tall poles than a basketball team from Warsaw and more filthy restrooms than a company picnic. By comparison, Dodger Stadium was a surgeon’s operating theater, clean and antiseptic, and Comiskey a cat’s litter box.

But the Pyramids and Parthenon and Leaning Tower of Pisa are also old and dusty, and you don’t see anybody knocking them down. Nobody says: “Hey, that old Sphinx is getting really gnarly. Let’s turn it into a parking lot or a FotoMat or something and build a new Sphinx in that sand over there.”

Oh, never mind. I’m just bitter. This new Comiskey Park is nice, and they still have the exploding scoreboard, and now they have the exploding Bo Jackson, so I suppose this is progress. Thirty years from now, somebody probably will say: Let’s knock down Dodger Stadium, that dump. And to my friends from L.A. I will say: Now you know how it feels.